4 Comments

Great panel. I wish I had known about it. We're pushing hard from the bottom up to return America to sound money, by returning every State to the Constitutional requirement that they use ONLY gold and silver coin in payments to and from the State (Article I, Section 10). See http://www.ConstitutionalTender.com/ for more info.

CSR
February 1, 2010 7:04 PM

For future: Restate the question during the Q&A. They cannot be heard and give context to the answers.

Amanda Jacobs
January 14, 2010 5:42 PM

The Mises folks are usually pretty good on this stuff! Well, except the 100% reserve or it's FRAUD position. If both parties are honest with each other and things are laid out beforehand, it can't be fraud.

Bill Denman
February 2, 2010 8:32 AM

Amanda:
I'm still on dial-up and am not able to download the program so I'm not sure what your comments concerning "100% reserve" and "fraud" are referring to. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding about the "100% reserve". It does not mean that banks must hold 100% of deposits in their vaults. They could not do business if that was the case. They must lend everything above their fractional reserve in order to make the profits necessary to pay interest to the savers and cover operating expenses in a free market banking system. The "100% reserve" phrase simply means that they must have 100% backing for any gold or silver certificates that they issue. In other words, they can not inflate the money supply by issuing more certificates than they have backing for. The word "reserve" is causing confusion because the term means something entirely different in the FED system than it does in a free market banking system. In the FED system "reserve" generally means creation of fraudulent money by simply crediting commercial banks' "reserves" in an amount (presently 10%) calculated from CHECKING account deposits. In a free market banking system "reserves" means the fraction of SAVINGS account deposits that the bank keeps on hand to meet unexpected withdrawals. These are fairly complex issues and I've written two articles which provide documented details. One is "Converting from Paper to Gold and Silver" (35 pages) and the other is "Free Market Banking" (19 pages). They are both written from a fundamental economic principles perspective (Austrian School) and can be downloaded from http://www.christianlibertyparty.com. Yes, the FED system IS fraudulent and I document that fact in the first article mentioned above.

ABOUT US

The mission of the Sound Money Project (SMP) is to engage and collaborate with organizations in the Atlas Network to raise awareness throughout the United States about the inherent problems of our current monetary system and develop a set of prescriptions that can serve as the “North Star” of future educational and advocacy efforts by free-market organizations.